This Tulsa Renaissance, as Leifeste put it, belied an older, darker history. His alma mater, Booker T. Washington High School, served as a Red Cross field hospital after the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Each of the cities I had been in so far — East St. Louis, Ill., in 1917; Chicago in 1919 — had experienced a wave of racial hatred following the northward movement of Black people escaping the Jim Crow South. In Tulsa, because of treaties signed between Native tribes and the Union following the Civil War, formerly enslaved Black people knew a level of freedom that was a world away from the post-Reconstruction South. “Here was a place,” writes Victor Luckerson in “Built From Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street” (2023), “where three-quarters of Black farmers owned their acreage and more than 80 percent of Black people could read — a higher literacy rate than any state in the South.” Luckerson describes the Black population of Oklahoma (which did not become a state until 1907) as trebling between 1900 and 1920, with some people even making the trek there by foot. Black theaters and small businesses flourished. A whole bourgeoisie of lawyers and doctors came into being. The affront that such a world posed to old racial attitudes in the South led to one of the great American atrocities. On May 31, 1921, a white mob stormed the neighborhood that had come to be known as Black Wall Street. They plundered, burned and destroyed 35 city blocks, killing as many as 300 people, including a beloved doctor. Black Wall Street never fully recovered. What gave the violence its special edge was that it had been designed to break the spirit of those who had risen above their station.
It would be self-regarding and disingenuous to believe that any of this history, in either its magnitude or its cruelty, is particular to America. But what is particular to America is the wish for history not to matter, for it to be devoid of consequence. In Mexico, in India, in Germany and Japan, people know they live in the aftermath of what those who went before them wrought. Here, in certain communities — African American, Jewish, Indigenous and Asian — history feels real, but the country as a whole projects an innocence that feels false. “Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection,” writes James Baldwin in “Notes of a Native Son” (1955), “and to transform their moral contradictions … into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.” Baldwin feels that such a response in the face of violence has to be a posture, an outright lie or a willful evasiveness. It’s what makes him want to rob his white countrymen of “the jewel of [their] naïveté,” to grab them by the lapels and drag them kicking and screaming before the mirror of history and have them look and see what they truly are. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin tells us in a 1962 essay, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Yet having grown up in a society robbed of its illusions, I always marveled at America’s need to be not merely prosperous and powerful but good. If and when the day comes (and it may already have) that America lets go of that belief in itself as a moral force in the world, many will breathe a collective sigh of relief, but just as many will mourn the loss of a fiction that gave this country its tremendous capacity for self-improvement and the sense of perfectibility that drew me here, away from the weariness of societies laden with history.
FROM OKLAHOMA TO TEXAS
AS THE FULL immensity of the West opened up around me (the speed limit was now 80 miles per hour), I found it harder to hold on to my old moorings. In Foss, Okla., halfway between Tulsa and Amarillo, I pulled off the road. I had for a long time now been seeing road signs in Gurmukhi, the liturgical language of the Sikhs. My mother is Sikh. The community, perhaps because of its martial and agrarian origins, as well as a fierce sense of autonomy, plays an outsize role in trucking and transport in India and North America alike. (Some 30,000 Sikhs have joined the North American trucking industry in just the past four years.) At last my curiosity got the better of me, and Exit 53 off Interstate 40 delivered me to the door of a traditional Indian truck stop restaurant called Preet Dhaba. Face-to-face with Satnam Singh, a striking Sikh in his 20s from Gurdaspur, in the North Indian state of Punjab, I almost blurted out, “What are you doing here?” We were standing, countryman to countryman, in an Oklahoma town so small there was a gas station and practically nothing else. “My brother came first,” he said, “and I followed because there was work.”
In Punjab, where drugs and unemployment are rife, the opportunity to come to the United States must have seemed like something of a lifeline to Satnam. It brought to mind a scene in one of my favorite driving books: “Travels With Charley: In Search of America” (1962) by John Steinbeck, which I had reread before this journey. “One of our most treasured feelings concerns roots,” Steinbeck writes, “growing up rooted in some soil or some community.” Meeting with residents of mobile homes in Ohio, he asks the inhabitant of one whether he would not feel bereft of these things. “My father came from Italy,” the man answers, “He grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived maybe a thousand years. That’s roots for you, no running water, no toilet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings. … I bet if you gave my old man the choice he’d cut his roots and live like this.”
